Catching up, I suppose.
Somehow it's turned into one of those really busy months, where I've been working on stuff more than anything else. Thing is, most of it isn't really worth talking about; not yet, anyway. Lifestyle maintenance is like that. It's not glamorous, interesting, or even all that fun, but it still has to get done, if only for the sake of one's mental health.
For starters, I've been trying to free up some room in my office (where I spend most of my days, if only because of my day job). Talking to someone a week or two ago about home setups, I set about finding my tape measure (it was in my toolbag where it should have been - horror of horrors!) and did a little figuring. It turns out that, if you don't count the space under my workbench where my legs go I only have about 20 square feet of floor space these days (five feet by four). No wonder I've been feeling so claustrophobic. So I've been taking steps to try to fix that, starting with tossing binders full of printouts that I haven't looked at since 2005.ev or therabouts into recycling, so that I can take books off of the tops of my shelves and put them away. This doesn't do anything about the floor space problem but it has helped because it's been a solid "this thing is in a better state" change. I've also been going through the optical disks in binders on my shelf, ripping them onto Leandra for archival, and throwing them out. That, when finished, will free up another six inches of shelf space (which, of course, will be put toward more books being put away properly). I have another bookshelf cull planned for the near future.
I've also been ripping and archiving home movies here and there - old-school VHS cassettes with home movies dating back to the early 90's. The reason for that is because video tapes take up a decent amount of space. I figure, if I can get the tapes digitized and backed up I can get rid of them. That makes root in the shipping crates stacked up in my office, which I can then use to store other stuff (like boxes of deduplicated photographs that I'll ship off to get scanned Real Soon Now. I may even be able to coalesce some of the smaller boxes into the newly freed up space. This should chip away at the floor space problem.
However, I have to figure out what to do with the duplicate photographs that were pulled out of the bundles. It feels weird to just throw them out because they're family pictures. It feels doubly weird to take them to Goodwill, which is just throwing them away with a few extra steps (because who buys family pictures on the second hand market?) But, after they're scanned and backed up I was going to get rid of the originals anyway... maybe I'm being too precious when it comes to managing this stuff. I don't know.
Incidentally, I know I should write up how I'm actually doing this (in terms of procedure). I'll get to it sooner or later. I've been way more worried about getting things done than writing about them for posterity.
As I write this HOPE is going on in New York. I really wish I was there. I miss spending time with my people. It wasn't in the cards this time around, plus the COVID risk is too high right now. I keep telling myself that posts from folks who caught the latest variant causing another spike in cases will eventually convince me that sitting this one out was be a good idea, but that doesn't keep missing it from sucking. I very much resent COVID as a whole for fucking up so many lives, especially because if effectively walls so many people out of any substantial social interaction. I don't think I'm speaking hyperbolically.
Also, as I write this (13 July 2024), Dr. Ruth Westheimer died at the age of 96. She had one hell of a run (original source) and I think that's all any of us can aspire to.
Which reminds me that I have photographs kicking around on Windbringer that I need to go through, build galleries of, and put online. I keep forgetting with everything else going on.
For the last few weeks, off and on, I've been doing a bit of hardware hacking. Not electronics as I sometimes do but taking apart and analyzing devices, with the eventual goal of communicating with them to get them to do something else. I've always had the intuition that electronic locks could be jackpotted somehow - opened up and patched into such that the motors could be activated separately from the electronics controlling them - but I'd never tried to do so before. For my birthday this year I received an FSFE fingerprint reader-slash-Bluetooth enabled drawer lock (affiliate link) so I decided to take a crack at it. To be honest, I haven't made much progress. Even with a couple of books on the topic handy (which, yes, I've read over the years) it seems a skillset and way of thinking about electronics that I'm not yet conversant of. Also, I think it might've been a better idea to pick something that isn't so damned tiny. Once I got the casing open, the circuitry extracted and under the microscope for examination (necessary for making anything at all out), I determined that it's based around the RTL8762CJ microcontroller, which is 5mm by 5mm in size. And that is one of the large components on the PCB (which is about the size of a USian quarter). There are a few clusters of contact pads that I think I've identified, but again, they're so tiny that I need to figure out a way to patch onto them. Soldering bodge wires onto them did not go as well as I'd expected. When I've got something worth writing about I'll post it. Even if it's "I don't know, I give up."
One other thing before I call this post done.. also as I write this it's come to light that AT&T was breached and somebody made off with multiple months of records. More specifically, somebody compromised an account of theirs at Snowflake, which is a company that specializes in storing, processing, and making it somewhat easier to work with vast quantities of data. I've not worked with them but I do know something about the data that was exfiltrated. Whoever did it made off with CDRs, Call Data Records. Without going into too much detail, every time a phone call or text message changes state (call initiated, call routing started, other side picked up, and so forth) it gets written to a log. The Wikipedia article is pretty accurate, and does a good job of eliding just how messy and hard to parse they are. Or how voluminous they are. Years ago I worked for a small telecom provider (about 100,000 customers, of which maybe a fifth were actively making calls at any time) and it was common for five to ten terabytes of CDRs to pile up on disk every day. That doesn't seem like a lot these days but in 2005 terabyte hard drives were uncommon and expensive; by the time I quit they were building a Beowulf cluster to process them. I never tried to quantify their contents because I never had the time but the logs for each switch were somewhere in the neighborhood of a few hundred thousand entries each (I'm probably lowballing it because it's been almost twenty years). The point I'm trying to make is this: Whoever took those CDRs from AT&T, if they took the raw CDR logs, has a lot of bandwidth and a lot of storage capacity at their disposal. Corporate or nation-state scale. I can't even begin to fathom how vast a quantity of CDR logs a company the size of AT&T generates every day, let alone over a few months.